Pat Summitt's Old Comments On Geno Auriemma Have Resurfaced

About a week ago UConn head women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma ranked among the most beloved and respected coaches in sports. But after a pretty poor display of sportsmanship in a Final Four loss to South Carolina's Dawn Staley, people have done some digging and found that some of the true greats of the sport just couldn't stand him.

The founder and chair of the Geno Auriemma Hate Club, so to speak, was the late-great Tennessee basketball coach Pat Summitt. Her Lady Vols battled Auriemma's Huskies countless times, including over a half-dozen meetings in the NCAA Tournament.

In her 2013 book Sum It Up, Summitt made it abundantly clear that she disliked Auriemma for a slew of reasons ranging from his "combative" nature in front of the media, his penchant for swearing out loud and his constant complaining.

"There was tremendous personal contrast as well," she wrote, via Secret Base on YouTube. "I tried to be correct and decorous in public; Geno was a smart-ass who would take negative attention over no attention at all. You could put a microphone on me for an hour and never hear anything worse than "dadgummit"; he was notoriously foulmouthed. I was intensely competitive but left it on the court; he was combative and carried grudges off the court. then of course there was the fundamental difference of all: gender. He complained about being a man working in a women's sport. To which I was always tempted to reply, 'Try being a woman in a man's world.'"